October 22, 2005.
While on a mission to find “expensive, isolated haciendas” for a wealthy Saudi
whose name shall not be mentioned, we visited a rancho near Nextipac. There we
chatted with two boys named Raul and Oscar who told us about cave entrances on
a nearby hill known as Cerro El Carro (Car Hill).

First, the boys
showed us several depressions that were once holes but are now “filled in.” Most
of these lie in a straight line which points towards the western branch of Qanat
La Venta. However, the rocky nature of the hillside precluded any likelihood of
an underlying man-made aqueduct.

The last
depression, however, was, in fact, a cave entrance. We crawled down into a space
among huge rocks and followed a crawlway which led to a large, totally dark
room. At the far end of this room we found a low crawl leading to a high, but
narrow fissure. This went off left and right, so it looked like we had two good
leads to more cave.

A few weeks later
we returned to Carro Cave with Chris, Sonia, Alberto and Victor. Mapping the cave to
the fissure took only a few minutes. Then, alas and alack, we discovered that
further progress was very difficult off to the right and downright dangerous to
the left, where you could upclimb to a higher level but above you were hundreds
of rocks precariously piled one upon the other and looking like they would all
descend if anybody sneezed.

Raul and Oscar
claim there are more and bigger caves in the area (best reached on horseback,
they say) but we are not holding our breath and I don’t see Chris reaching for
his survey tape.

Oscar climbing
down into the entrance room of Carro Cave.

Chapuzon
Revisited

Chapuzon or Cold
Dunk Cave is the only "river cave" located near Guadalajara. The river may not
be very big, but it is cold and it is wet! You can read about our
first
misadventures in Chapuzon and our
final
conquest and mapping of the cave, at our
Subterráneo website. In April, 2005,
Pedro Fernández somellera and John Pint visited Chapuzon Cave to get the GPS
coordinates for the tree-root entrance. A few weeks later, Jan Paul Vanderpas,
visiting from the Netherlands, and John Pint (Zotz) took a “sonic” (not laser)
distance-measuring device into Chapuzon Cave where they proved that such a
device is utterly useless in a cave (unlike the Disto laser measurer, which was
successfully used for dozens of cave surveys in Saudi Arabia). The "Strait-Line
Sonic Laser tape” is deceptively misnamed, as its laser is only for pointing
while the measurement is made by sound waves. The gizmo worked fine in a house,
using a clipboard for the flat surface needed. However, in Chapuzon the same
clipboard didn’t help a bit. The problem may be the echo or humidity of the cave
or something else we have completely missed.

After weeping over
the wasting of twenty bucks on this futile project, Pint led Vanderpas out of
the cave through the Boulder Choke entrance whose GPS location was duly noted.
The pair then valiantly searched for and found the Slot entrance, noting its
exact location.

In October, Luis
and Mary Rojas, Sonia Calvillo, Mario Guerrero and John Pint revisited the cave
in order to test the Pints’ new Nikon D70 in a cave.

Here you can see two
enthusiastic "slaves" hard at work assisting the photographer.

The Nikon remote flashes worked out well for anything
a few meters away, but they don't fire far from the camera like
"peanut" slaves (not to mention Fireflies), so you have to fire them
manually.

The
Nikon flash system worked fine for this
shot of Mary
Rojas crawling past Chapuzon wall slime, which we hope contains microorganisms that
will cure man’s intolerance of man or some other deadly disease. The white
color is actually hundreds of tiny droplets of water on the surface of the
slime.

We hope to take more pictures in Chapuzon Cave and to
feature it at the International Lava-Cave Symposium this coming July.

The final ritual after exiting Chapuzon
Cave (also known as Cold Dunk).

Tequilizinta:
Truly a Lava Cave

On December 20,
2005, Pedro Fernández Somellera, Sergi Gómez, John Pint and the entire Mohl clan
headed for Cuata or Tequilizinta Cave with the aim of determining whether it is
or is not a true lava tube.
This cave,
which is described in Subterráneo #6, is in a cliffside overlooking the Santiago
River and was believed (by members of a possibly now defunct religious sect) to
be one of seven places that will be spared when Doomsday comes. It also features
one of the muddiest and stickiest rooms we've ever seen.

We discovered a
new and easier way to reach the trail to Tequilizinta and after some hunting,
found our way up to the cave. The altar is now covered with a layer of guano,
but otherwise, the cave looks about the same as it did when we filmed the
five-minute Zotz blockbuster movie, MUD, some years ago...

Pedro checks to see if there's really
an altar under all that guano.

...Crawling to the cave’s
delightful pool of vampire guano and water, we spotted small lava
stalactites on the ceiling, which seem to prove that this is a genuine lava
tube.

Unfortunately, we
did not have time to check out the state of the “ghost town” atop Tequilizinta
Bluff. A subsequent trip by John and Susy Pint and Sonia Calvillo, convinced us
that this elusive settlement is not exactly where John thought it would be,
meaning the place is now more ghostly than ever.

Sergi Gómez
and David Mohl waiting for Armageddon in Tequilizinta Cave.

Chiquihuitón
Cave: The impossible Climb and the Impassable passage

On Dec 4, 2005,
Pedro and Celina Fernández Somellera joined Susy and me in an attempt to reach
Chiquihuiton Fissure Cave. We drove to La Toma Valley, just past Tequila and had
a nice chat with the owner of La Toma Swimming Pool.

While paging
through our book “Outdoors in Western Mexico” (which chides this place for its
noisiness) the owner said she would willingly turn off the blaring radio for
any weekday visitors requesting a bit of quiet.

Pedro and Solito enjoying the solitude
of La Toma waterfall. Just don't go on a Sunday!

Selina enjoys a
"natural swing" at La Toma Balneario, located just beyond the town of
Tequila.

We then went off
to hunt for a path to the cave. In the old days, we used to cut through the lush
La Toma orchard (when we were thin enough to squeeze through the bars of a small
side gate. Now they have added more bars to the gate, while the years have added
more fat to us, so we had to find ourselves a new access route to the cave. A
long walk with Pedro and Celina led us to the orchard guard, who showed us a path
supposedly leading up to the cave. This climb we had to postpone because of an
urgent need to gain a few more pounds at a fine restaurant in Tequila.

Susy and Selina. The problem was to
find a path up the sheer cliff you can see in the background.

Later, I returned
with Sergi and Sonia. We followed a nice path about 250 m north through an agave
field sprinkled with big black volcanic rocks. The sharp needles normally found
at the tips of the agave “leaves” had been thoughtfully trimmed, resulting in a
pleasant—instead of excruciatingly painful—hike. But then we arrived at the
bottom of the extremely steep slope, which must be climbed to get to the cave. At
this point, the path vanished completely. “Well,” we said, “if we just head
uphill, we are bound to intersect the old path…how could we miss it?”

Well, this
all-too-close-to-90° slope is covered with a thick tangle of trees, weeds,
thorns and cacti which we slowly penetrated, groping for skinny papelito trees
and pulling ourselves upward. Halfway up what seemed more and more like a wall
rather than a slope, we came to the conclusion we were never going to cross that
infamous path and we had no choice but to keep inching our way upwards, sweating
and cursing until we finally reached the top, where I flopped down on my back,
like a fish out of water, huffing and puffing for dear life.

We soon found the
cave, whose entrance is located just below a natural bridge known locally as El
Arco. Chiquihuitón is a complex fissure, on several levels. We have mapped
hundreds of meters of it, but there are still plenty of passage awaiting the
measuring tape. The purpose of this visit was only to get the GPS location of
the entrance and a few pictures of the long roots which hang down from the
ceiling in several parts of the cave.

Sergi just inside the cave entrance.

...We entered the
cave by climbing down a little drop into a long crack and crawled through a low
spot out of which cold air was blowing. This gets you into the complex system of
fissures to which there seems to be no end.

Sergi climbing. Note a bit of daylight
high above. Most of the cave, however, is totally dark.

Only a few meters inside, we came to the
Ham Slicer, a vertical slot through which we all used to pass in the old days.
Ah, well, those days are gone for good: I couldn’t fit!

Sonia slips right
through the Slicer while John curses his fate.

So, I had to be content to find my
own roots, while Sonia and Sergi went on to take some stunning shots deeper
inside the cave.

This was the best
I could do. As you can see, there is potential here for a great "caver
wearing wig" shot...

...and here is
Sergio's portrait of "Sonia, Queen of the Roots."

Of course, on the
way down, we found our mislaid path. As we descended “decently” we could
appreciate the stupendous view from the ridge. We could see blue agave fields, bonete trees with their green, bomb-shaped fruits and across the valley,
shooting out of a hole in the opposite wall of the canyon, we could see a mighty
waterfall. Here is a really challenging cave which has not yet been
explored… Andale, Sergi!